white space Is… Prompt #3

Imagine radically.

Pinpoint a way that you feel compromised inside the spaces you are in. And imagine another option, other options.

An example from my experience:
As of right now, I rely mainly on institutions for my income. I feel my body bending to fit into the containers that the same body wants to explode. So I’m employing myself and my people and the technologies they employed/passed down to me, to begin to imagine other options of being materially secure and not compromised. What are other ways to get this munny?

In other words, how are you leaving, getting out, stepping away, slowly backing away, dipping, ghosting, divesting from the compromise, and what are you imagining in its place, and who are you imagining it with?

This prompt I’ll be hosting a few in person gatherings, and am inviting folks to host their own. No need to film or record the gathering.

Jonathan González: And then I’m an artist. And artists are all very deeply involved in capitalism, because we make work and have a desire to produce, and producing is already the product. And I work with institutions. I do work site specifically. I work with places that are theaters and gallery spaces but all of them have systems in place that ask me to enter into their space, so that’s the first position of power. You as the artist can now come in and make a work and we will fund you to a certain demand and you have to find the rest of it. And we are going to try our best to frame what you are and what you are making for our audience and demographic, and all of that shaping, all of that sculpting is most of the time me in negotiation, or like a kind of contrarian trying to fight the kind of language that they would like to lay on me and my work, which I think is very specific to all black artists. Laughs. And so in that way I’m always navigating white spaces there too and how to imagine, radically, while also be in negotiation somehow.